AND IT'S CALLED EVERGREEN

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If you can't kill it, I guess you may as well call it Evergreen. Launched in 1957, with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy, Evergreen Review thrived for 16 years on scandalizing American propriety with audacious writing. Then it went silent for many years before it was revived on-line in 1998, and again in 2017. Now under the leadership of publisher John Oakes and Editor-in-Chief Dale Peck, the magazine has just published the first of four installments of its Fall issue, and is again kicking against the pricks.

Headlining the issue is Guatemalan journalist José García Escobar's report on the immigrant caravan traveling from Honduras to the United States. Having embedded himself among the refugees, he was privy to their stories of hardship and to the moral ambiguities of covering them. Looking at the problem from the other end, the American side, Natascha Elena Uhlmann argues in her essay on why ICE should be abolished. Legal prohibitions aside, Lonely Christopher pens a lovely elegy to the late New Narrative writer Kevin Killian, in whose writings he finds much to scandalize the sexually prudish.

In my first foray as the magazine's poetry editor, I'm absurdly proud of publishing four new poems by Irish poet Tara Bergin and six new poems by Israeli writer Larry Weisman. Tara's work I have been following since both of us appeared in Carcanet's New Poetries series, following with admiration, even astonishment. Larry and I went back even further, when we were both apprentices at the on-line poetry workshop called Poetry Free-for-All. He has since developed a poetic voice that is closest thing I know to the voice of Wisdom in the Bible. If you like the poems and you write poems as well, please consider sending me 5-10 of your best new poems at jeeleong@evergreenreview.com.

Jee Leong Koh
November 7, 2019

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